 Fourth in the series, Road to Addis, which is the lead up to the World Telecommunications Development Conference in November in Addis Ababa, hosted by the ITU. This session is called Finance to Connect, Innovative Ways to Finance Connectivity. My name is David Kirkpatrick. I'm a journalist and the editor and founder at a company called Techonomy Media in New York, where we believe very deeply the importance of bringing the world together digitally, which is what we're talking about today. Our host today will be Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau. And we will also hear a keynote at the outset from Vulcan Bhaskir, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, who just yesterday hosted a very impressive, I think kind of even landmark event at the UN on the importance of connectivity for achieving the SDGs and moving the world forward. So it's really great to be here. I'll just give you a quick, some quick housekeeping notes. This session is gonna be entirely remote, webcasted, live streamed and recorded. The recording will be available after the fact on the ITU website. As a participant, you're free to use the chat during the session anytime you'd like to communicate with other participants as a group. Questions that you ask to the speakers should be inserted in the Q&A, using the Q&A function in Zoom. If time allows, we will be addressing some of those questions. You can also upvote a question by clicking the thumbs up icon next to a question and Zoom will automatically sort them by the number of upvotes so they become more relevant. Also, during the session, we provide captioning services that you can activate by clicking on closed caption in the bottom bar of the Zoom interface. So let me now introduce you to the extremely impressive group of speakers we're going to hear from today. I mentioned Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who's the director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau. We'll also hear from Ms. Aya Miyaguchi, who's the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. Mr. Hiro Mizuno, who's the United Nations Special Envoy on Innovative Finance and Sustainable Investments and a member of the Board of the Principles for Responsible Investment Association. Ms. Mabato Matsumai, who is founder of the Afro-Lucianist and a member of the ITU Generation Connect Visionaries Board. Mr. Andile Ngaba, who's a founding partner and chairman, convergence partners investments coming to us from Johannesburg. Ms. Charlotte Petri-Gornica, Assistant Secretary General and UNICEF Deputy Executive Director for Partnerships. Ms. Preeti Sinha, Executive Secretary United Nations Capital Development Fund. And finally, let me introduce you to Jim Rogers, who's our graphic designer and illustrator for these Road to Addis events, who will be creating a graphic illustration of this session in real time, which we'll bring to you at the end. So let me also, it wasn't really finally when I said Jim, because I want to introduce you to Danola Oladapo, who is ITU's Generation Connect Engagement Manager. And please say hello, Danola, and tell us what you're going to be doing. Hello, everyone. It's really great to be in this meeting today. I hope everyone's going to be interactive. If you have any comments or any question, of course you can use the chat function, but I'll also be looking on Twitter. So please use the hashtag ITWTDC and also Generation Connect, if you're part of our virtual community. And then hopefully at some point in the meeting, we'll be able to read out some of your comments and questions to the panel. Thank you, Danola. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Doreen for her opening remarks. Thank you, David. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. And welcome to today's session entitled Finance to Connect Innovative Ways to Finance Connectivity, which marks our next stop in the road to Addis. Today we're going to grapple with one of the toughest questions of all, what will it cost to connect the world? And how do we find those vital investment dollars at a time when countries are still reeling from the unprecedented, ongoing economic damage inflicted by the COVID crisis? ITU's Connecting Humanity Report released last year estimated that over 428 billion will be needed to provide connectivity to the world's people by 2030. In Africa alone, the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development estimated that 100 billion would be needed to bring broadband to everyone on the continent within the same timeframe. If this investment funding was hard to find pre-COVID, it's going to be even harder to find as we move out of this pandemic into a post-pandemic mode. And yet connectivity is the vital element that will help to protect nations from future crises because digital confers resilience, digital protects economic performance and preserves social cohesion and digital drives growth. New research from ITU indicates that a 10% increase in broadband translates into a per capita GDP increase of 2% or better with poorer regions actually enjoying the biggest broadband boost. So the big questions for our panelists today are, how do we convince governments to prioritize connectivity at a time when there's so many other urgent calls on the public purse? And once we've succeeded in convincing them, how can we help them find the resources, the resources they need to make their digital development strategies a reality? As a starting point, David, I want to suggest five broad focus areas. First, a top level commitment to broadband networks as basic infrastructure. This is vital to national development as transport energy and water networks. Second, new models for multi-stakeholder collaboration between industry investors, governments, development finance institutions, donors and international organizations. And I hope Charlotte will talk about our exciting Giga School Connectivity Project that we're working on together with 19 governments around the world. The next point, enabling regulatory policies and incentives where we can leverage the principles of fifth generation collaborative regulation that will help us to create investment-friendly environments. A whole of government approach is the next point whereby large-scale centralized government digital infrastructure projects are funded by sustainable long-term savings for each government department. And finally, an openness to emerging technologies like blockchain, which provide new ways to monitor, to measure and to manage digital resources. As David mentioned yesterday at the high-level debate on digital cooperation that was convened by the president of the General Assembly, many speakers stress the urgent need for the global community to work creatively with the private sector and other constituents to forge an entirely new paradigm that will drive digital development. This will be the key focus of ITU's upcoming World Telecommunications Development Conference, which will bring together not just 193 governments, but also private sector, national, regional, and international financing and development institutions, as well as academia and civil society. Right now, according to the OECD, out of $379 trillion in global financial assets, 81% are in high-income countries, 19% in middle-income countries, and less than 1% in low-income countries. So my question for the panelists, how can we change this picture and help investment flow into areas where it's needed most? Are there creative ways that we can leverage the universal service funds that over 80 nations have established, but which are sometimes sitting untapped for years and years on end? And what about the potential of emerging new types of investments, such as the estimated $2 trillion held in cryptocurrencies? And so without further ado, let me welcome today's outstanding panel of experts who will share their views on the most effective and powerful ways to rapidly re-energize digital investments. I encourage you, as Denola has already mentioned, I encourage the audience to be active, feel free to participate in our conversation, share your ideas on the chat, on Twitter, and share with us actionable solutions to accelerate efforts to reach unconnected communities. With that, David, thank you so much. I hand back to you. Thank you, Doreen. Great points. We do need a paradigm shift. And exemplifying that here in the United States, where I'm coming from, there is still, believe it or not, a debate as to whether connectivity and broadband infrastructure is real infrastructure like roads and ports, which is astonishing. We gotta change that. It's amazing all the people that are here from all over the world today. Very inspiring. So let me now introduce a keynote speech from Mr. Volkan Baskir, who is the President of the United Nations General Assembly. And as we said, convened that discussion yesterday. Unfortunately, he's not able to be here in person, but he's sent us a short video. So let's watch that now. Excellent seats, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this important discussion. As I emphasized yesterday at the high-level thematic debate on digital cooperation and connectivity, the digital divide was real, long before the global pandemic. I'm thus encouraged by the support from member states to tackle this issue and welcome the discussion from ITU, which will help to carry this conversation forward. Dear colleagues, we have watched year in and year out as the benefits of innovation and ingenuity have been accessible to some, but not others, feeling a new form of inequality that has undermined progress against the sustainable development goals. COVID-19 and the emergency measures put in place have only exacerbated these inequalities. For too many, the absence of digital access has intensified the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic, sequestering them from the ability to work or study and limiting their access to digital financial services. While we cannot go back and change this, we must see this as a wake-up call and make every effort to close the gap now. With literally trillions of dollars pouring into global recovery efforts, we have the resources to expand digital access worldwide quickly and dramatically. In doing so, we must move to create markets and enabling environments that are accessible and attractive to investment. Explore creative forms of blended finance and ensure that funding is allocated to needed infrastructure. In your discussions today, I encourage you to explore and put forward creative proposals to incentivize investment and to strengthen or expand funding mechanisms. This includes supporting and proposing initiatives with transformative potential, such as Gigabonds, an innovative funding instrument that aims to leverage donor commitments to facilitate further investments and has the potential to connect schools across the planet. Likewise, I ask that you consider the impact of digital technologies as an SDG accelerator. Investment in this area has profound implications across the entirety of the 2030 agenda, empowering women and girls, creating jobs and livelihoods, and building sustainable infrastructure to name but a few. Finally, I encourage all partners to work with ITU, to fulfill its mandate in this area, including through the Outcoming Partner to Connect segment of the World Telecommunication Development Conference. Colleagues, I thank you again for continuing the momentum from yesterday's high-level thematic debate. By putting in place the financial resources in to expand digital access, we can empower billions of people across the globe. Truly, an opportunity we cannot miss. Thank you. Prior to your current role, you were the Chief Investment Officer of the Japan Government Pension Investment Fund, which is the largest pension fund in the world with over $1.6 trillion in assets. So based on all that, what have you concluded are the incentives that are needed to encourage more investment in ICT connectivity, particularly by long-term investors? Thank you, David. And thanks, ITU, to invite me to join the panel with the other distinguished panels. I'm very excited to hear everybody's view. Well, as you kindly introduced, I used to manage the World Largest Pension Fund with $1.5 trillion. And at that time, I was approached by many, many projects originator, including the ones in the international platform as well as a local platform in the developing countries. And a lot of people think that with $1.5 trillion, just giving a little small amount of money to those projects should be easy, but the actual response from our fund was totally opposite because there are a lot of challenges for the big institutional investors to participate in those opportunities. And I think my role as a special envoy in innovative finance and sustainable investment with that background is to bridge the gap between what the industry investor is looking for and there's a lot of the mutual misunderstanding like what the both party can provide. So I think that's the role I'm trying to play. So several things I like to share with you that the challenge is for institutionally investor like a pension fund or insurance company even a big bank to participate in those digital infrastructure project. Most of those, first of all, the individual project is too small and requires too much resource relative to the actual financial return they can actually create. So the size matters and also the size actually has an implication on how much resource each investor have to allocate to analysis, analyze those informations and available. So the one is we need to find a way to kind of like gather all the different opportunities. And I said one of the keyword which I gave to the organizer in advance is creating sort of a universal platform or universal ownership approach. So if we could gather a group of investor to work together and investing into the sort of like an aggregated opportunities and having the institution like developing the banks and some of the UN entities to provide a resources for the investor to save some of their resources to be serious about those investments. And the other point I would like to make is the return has a problem and the World Bank those people can de-risk the investment for private sector investors by providing guarantees or getting a leverage with donation and et cetera. But the return even after de-risking seems to be too low compared to the easy money they can make investing in a capital market. So we just need to create the way to differentiate a pricing to make the investors work worthwhile. And then again requires sort of a universal approach such as like creating an integrated fund so that we have created a group to do all the due diligence for the investors and they can leverage the return using a structure. So I just wanted to share those two points. There are so many challenges but we can be a little bit more innovative and the resources are there but we need to aggregate those and create a structure to provide a universal opportunity to universal platform. And that's the message from me. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Hiro. So now and Dile, you are a long time investor in ICT and with a lot of success in emerging markets particularly in Africa. So what do you see from based on your long experience we are the opportunities for investing in ICT connectivity? Thank you. Thank you, David. And again, good day everybody. And I think one very critical issue for me is let's open source the network, the infrastructure. The radio access network, the access network, the core, the long haul network. If you open source you can lower that 428 billion by about 25% using open source. Open source has been used in a lot of other areas parallel to us and has proved to be very successful. So one, to lower the price, to make sure that we can attract a number of investors, let's open source the entire connectivity stack as we see it today. That process has started, we need to accelerate it to 2030. Number one. Number two, we need to make sure that the access part of the network we really create an environment where we exempt it from license fees so that we can bring as many entrepreneurs as possible. The last one. We need to, I think we had about blended finance. I mean, yesterday you might have seen, I mean, European investment bank launched a digital bond and Goldman was amongst the banks who basically managed that 100 million bond. It's the road in the right direction. We need to create more of these digital bonds. We need to tokenize the infrastructure so that in my village, in my township, in my city, in my town, I can have a piece of ownership, fractional ownership of that network. That is the new way in which we can encourage or we can almost crowd source that 428 billion. Thank you. Thank you, Andile. Okay, Aya. Andile mentioned tokenizing some of the investments in infrastructure. That's really interesting. You are an expert in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. There's been a lot of talk about how that's going to change financing of all sorts of things in the world. So how do you think it can change the financing of the rollout of digital connectivity? Thank you, David, for the introduction. And this is a perfect order after Andile explained these things very, very well. So what I'm most excited about blockchain is this can empower any participant, all the stakeholders to have the right and accountability in the project. And we talk about connecting or the connectivity, but how we connect is also important and this technology can help. And as people may know, we often say blockchain can provide a trust network. You can build a trust network between organizations and individuals, but what that really means is that it provides accountability and transparency, especially with the themes smart contracts play a role to make this technology work like a computer. It executes transactions in exactly how you code and also can be attached with real-time time data and information. So if you use your real-time connectivity data, such as like if one gigabyte of internet is actually provided, that can execute the payment of the connectivity automatically. And normally that requires a lot of coordination and there has been coordination issues with that, but this technology can make things more efficient and effective. And since this is on the public network, it also provides transparency to all the stakeholders involved, including investors, the internet providers and public agencies. And it can also provide different ways for more people to invest in the connectivity, participate in the investment in more diverse ways. Like Andrea has said, like if you care about some regions, this specific region or a specific given school, there is a way for you to participate in the investment for meaning for you, even the audience of this event. And so that is something new compared to a conventional way of financing. And there's also staking, I'm not going into too much details of the technical part, but Ethereum is about to be upgraded to Ethereum 2.0, which has the proof of stake technology, which is going to make the energy consumption very, very efficient. But the part how the network is secured compared to proof of work is validators can participate in staking and receive some reward out of it. And then compared to the older version, this enables anyone to participate with their home computer. And with that, staking can also provide another way of some type of financial independence, which can be part of this whole project. And that's been already being discussed. Thank you so much. Really interesting opportunities there. Preki, the UN Capital Development Fund focuses on unlocking public and private finance for the poor in least developed countries. So what do you think are some innovative ways to finance ICT connectivity, particularly thinking about the demand side? Sure, thanks, David. And it's great to be here with ITU and colleagues on the panel. Let me just introduce the work that UNCDF does. So we are the UN agency that serves to finance the 46 least developed countries in the world. So the LTCs, as we call them, which I call them the pre-frontier markets. I think they are the last frontier of investment opportunity. So within that mandate, we have an inclusive digital economies team, a focus area, where we really look to create infrastructure and the SMEs to provide IT connectivity to the last mile. So the motto there is leave no one behind in the digital era. So answering your question, we focus both on the supply and the demand. On the supply, we try to use innovative financing. And on the demand, we focus on SMEs and businesses. So I'd like to take an example of Uganda. So in Uganda, we worked with the largest coffee exporter to digitize his payments to 6,000 plus farmers. So to achieve that, we needed a tower and the local telecom operator didn't see the business case in putting up a tower. So just to add that UNCDF has four instruments, financial instruments at its disposal. And this was something given to us by the member states back in 1966, we can do grants, TAs, loans and guarantees. So basically we went ahead and gave a $100,000 guarantee to MTN in this case, which set up a tower. And that enabled the mobile payments to start. And to the surprise, MTN broke even, I think in six months and the average adoption of the mobile payments was 25% higher than a national average. So what we saw was that in about three years that the coffee exporter had about 50% of the farmers on digital payments. And again, on the demand side, we then worked with a company called Yo Uganda to distribute SIM cards and affordable telephones to all the farmers so that they could then also participate in that. So what we find is this role of blended finance along with market development is the key. And we believe the investment in digital is important to leapfrog some of the actual infrastructure that is needed. That might take time, roads might take time but digital can go very fast. And maybe just to add the role of government is as well very important in this case. So again, going back to Uganda, we participated in the government's technology working group where we brought together multi-stakeholder partners including private sector, telecom operators. And what that has led to is sort of creation of investment opportunities in that country and through the National Planning Commission in getting digital strategy into the National Development Plan and then also into Uganda's digital vision. So I believe that was sort of useful work and that's how I would say UNCDF has played a role. And we did similar work with Solomon Islands. We just released something called the Inclusive Digital Economies Index that measures how the country is progressing on its digital strategy with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogaware in Solomon Islands. And we also finally have a Better Than Cash Alliance which is BTCA, another part of the UNCDF with 77 member countries which is transforming cash into digital payments. So with that I'd like to say I have colleagues Chris Licoglio from the Uganda team here and also Mark Wellesley. So if there are any questions on LDCs you can put them in the chat. Thanks very much over to you. Thank you so much Preeti. Charlotte, you've had a long career in working for poverty alleviation and addressing the challenges of inequality not only at UNICEF where you are now but also when you headed the Swedish Development Agency we've heard already some really interesting ideas for how financing can be thought of differently. Tell us how you're thinking about it and what do you think the keys are gonna be to get capital into development projects at scale? Thank you very much colleagues. We've heard a lot already and I've been around for a while and I believe in the power of examples. And of course we know that we need to enhance the public money and attract the private capital. We know that. Needless to say two things that are hindering and hampering from the perspective of a UNICEF or even a donor like SIDA. One is that we just need to work on to enhance the impact transparency. We need to make sure that we have impact measurement and reporting models that are actually matching the expectations of the partner. We know that we've been talking about it. We also know that we need a mindset shift in the organizations that I talk about the UNICEF and the donors to take more risks, to understand that grants is just one thing and we really need to use the public money to enhance. Let me take two minutes around an example. We have a slide and I hope we can put it on now. So, ITU and UNICEF, we have a vision that by 2030 every school everywhere in the world will be connected. For UNICEF, the end game of this is obviously opportunity for children and young people, but it could also be seen as an investment in infrastructure. This example, and I hope you can see the green dots, this is Brazil, by the way, the green dots, that's where schools are connected to a good internet. The yellow dots are kind of in between and the red dots in the more poor part of Brazil, that's where schools are not connected. In countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and others, we are now using mapping like this as a point of departure to make a business case happening. This is where we start and everything should be turned green. And this is also an example of where measurements can be very tangible. In real time, you can actually see something yellow or red turn green. It takes four hours to turn that, everything is digital. So for the partner, this is real time, tangible, concrete way to measure the impact, the social and the infrastructure outcome. And it's also very much attractive to the private sector when they build their business case. And when it comes to this example, what we are trying to do now, ITU, UNICEF, you even heard the wider UN system working with this. We are obviously trying to enhance public money and really get the private sector attracted to this. We heard about a digital bond. Now we are introducing the gigabond, which is the same idea, to make sure that we can frontload investments to make this happen now and to really look for the solutions that I heard Hiro talk about. We need probably an integrated fund, we need aggregate, but we also need the local ownership of this. And to finalize, I think it's very important to realize that this initiative with Giga, it was important when we started, but listen, COVID has really, really enhanced the need for a big, big effort here because the divide between children who can access remote learning and those can. It's just widening while we see the opportunity of more quality thanks to digital solutions. So the opportunity is great, but if we don't do this, we will actually widen the gap and the exclusion of the digital connectivity. So this is so important and the example is so important to make both the public and the private sector ready to jump and take the risks together. Thank you. Thank you, Charlotte. This whole idea of stimulating demand, understanding what will actually happen once we get connectivity and making people aware of what the benefits are, such a huge part of this discussion. So thank you for that. Thank you, Preeti, also for that point. So now I'm going to turn the stage over to Mabasuo Matsumai who, as I mentioned before, is representative from the Generation Connect Visionary Board. She's got some thoughts and questions for the panelists. So Mabasuo, take it away. Thank you, David. So particularly in my segment, it's really to understand where youth come in when it comes to financing to connect and rather specifically understanding that youth, young people, serve different profiles. So as much as young people are not a monolith, there are various structural, social and economic determinants within their participation in receiving finance to connectivity, but also engaging more economically in realizing connectivity in their areas. For starters, I'll start on structural determinants. A lot of young people do have internet access or through high mobile penetrations. However, there are different social and structural determinants such as electrification, such as data costs and such as other social determinants as in access to income for electrification and data costs. But largely the major issue here is a lot of young people are rather seen as consumers and not as investors or co-partners in determining finance to connectivity. And for the larger part is my question to the panel for the first is that how can young people, how can young people been seen as part of the supply chain or the core supply chain, particularly coming from the global south and not necessarily consumers in the demand, in the end of the chain as the demand has increased? Secondly, with regards to access to, and thank you Charlotte for that example of creating more school access. We're also cognizant of the fact that there are a lot of young youth, e-girls and boys who have social structures and social determinants that take away their access to school. And how would you then start looking into your former and global institutions, looking towards accessing the public spaces rather than just schools to increase connectivity for young people and engaging in that. We also need to see as Andy Lingneba noted, crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing, right? Within crowdsourcing we also look at informal markets and informal economy that remains untapped by formal institutions based on their own formal definitions and their own red tape within creating financial structures. How then can we use the informal economy where we do find a lot of young people participating not only as business owners, but are scaling their businesses and SMMEs into create heightening economic participation. How then can we tap into these markets and see people working in the informal economy as potential investors through the large scale? When it comes to blockchain, as I has noted, there is so much opportunity within blockchain and blockchain has been used in many governance structures, as means as tackling corruption and creating more transparency. In West Africa, for example, blockchain has been used in helping determine land ownership and land rights. However, we see that there's still a low uptake and low trust within blockchain based on data and privacy issues. How then do you think we can increase trust, rather? How can we create more of a trust between the user and for policy makers to help engage in the use of blockchain and investing, of course, in companies, SMMEs, which are young, which are youth led to engage in helping realize blockchain technology in the global south and in LMICs? Lastly, I would speak holistically towards creating an entire ecosystem beyond financing for connectivity, but understanding structural determinants particularly with regards to electrification. It's not enough for countries to have 4G, 5G and 3G technologies and high mobile penetration. It's also more to ensure that this works hand in hand with other infrastructural developments such as an increase of electrification, affordability and regulatory costs of data. How then can we ensure that within our work as financiers for different forms of connectivity? How then do we ensure that we're working hand in hand with other stakeholders and other core partners that help realize the goal that we need to reach 2030? Thank you. Wow, great questions and comments, Mabuto. I would invite any of the speakers to pick up on anything there that they want to elaborate on. And Delay, do you want to jump in? It starts. Thank you. Thank you, David. Thanks, Mabuto. I think, I mean, I'll take a piece on informal markets. I mean, the most important thing, the way we explain connectivity to people, we need to make sure that people understand that this is a marketplace for them to take their products online, rather than an old way of telephony and the ability for you to talk to other people. Once people understand that true connectivity, you expand your market if you were selling your product, for instance, sitting in a market somewhere in Khabirone or in Lagos or in Kampala, but with an ability to be connected, you can take your products online. And we have hundreds of these examples. This is how connectivity should be understood that it is a marketplace. It is ability to take SMMEs, informal companies into the market, which they would then have reached much wider than anyone. There is, for instance, a team of women in Rwanda who have produced quite a beautiful jewelry that today you can find in New York and other places. And this jewelry is done in Africa and before they would sell it in a local environment. This is what connectivity does. It must not be seen as something, it generates economy, it generates productivity in people. Thanks, Adili. Charlotte, did you want to say something? Yeah. Yes. So young people, let me again build on the example just as a comment of an image. So a school is not only a school. It's kind of a place around which you can invest. So we actually see it's, we're starting to build the community. And for us, you wouldn't be surprised that we want to engage young people and help them, if you will, to see business opportunities. But what we know is that when you work with entrepreneurs and SMEs, it's very fragile if something happens. So again, we need the public and the private. So we need like a protection scheme and a security, which means that you have a little bit of a public finance if worse come to worst. So again, to maintain young people into their business, we need the combination of solutions. And this is happening, not at scale, not as it should be, and perhaps not enough digitally. But there are models that we can build on. And of course we need to engage with the youth. And I also got the question, or maybe we got the question on the gigabond. And I'm not the technical expert, but I just want to give you some examples. When we made the world able to afford vaccines for routine vaccinations, we backed that with public money, with guarantees and front loading, and we made that happen. It's a similar idea with this gigabond. And we just need the aggregated that hero is talking. We need an aggregate, we need a big of a group to rally around that idea. Thank you. Aya, did you want to pick up on the beginning? Yeah. Thank you so much, Mubutal, for excellent questions. I think it's really important for someone like you and also the voices, either young people or like who are going to actually benefit from the project to be listened and being cooperated. And I do, I'm a huge believer of public boxing. That's why I work for Ethereum. And when you say it is still, you know, like not like a real connection with the users and users and the system is, you know, depending on the system that's being used for governments or other projects, it has to be, I think at the end of the day, it has to be the public system, but now it's more of the hybrid structure that people are using or building. And for the end users to have the accountability or have the right, I think this technology is really to empower the end users to participate. And since if you use a programmable blockchain like Ethereum, like you can build the governance structure in any way for you to participate in any part. And that's how we structure this architect. This is very, very important. And like internet used to be internet. So that's where how a lot of block scenes are still being used now. And we need to bring it to internet so that you really can participate in the project. But that is really up to the builder and up to the project, how to build this. And then, so I think it's really important for you to keep challenging and pushing these questions so that, this becomes the system for really for the public and the end users. Thanks to all of you. I wanna ask a question, which is the point about the demand side is so critical. And it really underscores the notion that investing in ICT infrastructure is not just about a return on the investment in the wires and the wireless and all that stuff. It's about the social benefit that can be achieved and somehow thinking of that holistically so that the aggregate wealth creation that is generated by investing in ICT infrastructure can somehow get shared with those who make the initial investment. And maybe you, Hiro, could comment on that. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for an excellent challenge. My life has been, has become like a promoting a long-term investment and also they are trying to make the ESG prevail in the investor's decision-making. That's actually trying to broaden the time frame of the financial investors because ESG is basically the taking environmental social governance into their investment decision. But if you look at it from the different perspective that means we are trying to expand the stakeholder. Stakeholder is not only our financial customers but we are trying to serve the future generation as well. So they are taking care of the environment as a part of investment risk factor or opportunity is basically bringing future generation as a stakeholder because we try to save the environment for future generation, not for our current generation. So I think expanding the stakeholder base is the one thing the ESG can bring for it. And the other point I like to make is it's very important to make it a global movement that all these kind of things like what we are trying to achieve with SDGs. If we fail to achieve that, we are gonna have a detrimental impact on the portfolio of all the financial investors, including a big pension fund. So I think they're trying to create that kind of holistic perspective. It's very, very difficult actually for the people who grew up in the finance industry but it's good for them to hear concerted voice from your generation, right? And that people will find out and those kind of the inequality if left, and rest it will create a huge disruption to the world. That means a huge disruption to disruption to their portfolio of what they are holding for their own immediate beneficiaries. So it's very important for you to work with the people in your generation leaders and raise those voices and send a message if investor couldn't join to help address that problem. It will create that financial implication or consequences. Thank you, Hiro. Even the very new increased focus on connectivity per se is a sign that a more holistic thinking is emerging on a global basis. Mabato, do you wanna, Mabato, I always pronounced wrong. So if you wanna make a comment in Pre-T we definitely wanna hear from you also. Thanks. Mabato, you got any response so far? Yes, I kind of want to wait for Pre-T to make a response so far for my holistic rebuttal. Okay, great. Thank you, I had something to add. So UNCDF has been working in eight countries and let me name them on a program called Youth Start. So to answer your question, Mabato, it's with Burkina Faso, with DRC, Etopia, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo and Uganda. So it's a program called Youth Start. And there we use our funding to work with about 10 financial institutions in these eight countries to create a specific digital inclusion products for youth. And these are focused around like four goals. One would be rent to own smartphone payments. How can youth afford the phones? Around goal-based savings, so savings starting from a very early age. Digital credit, if they wanna start their own businesses, think about that. And biometric bank access points. So all these issues help access to finance. Basically financial inclusion. When you have access to capital and credit, I think helps both in education and starting up businesses. So I wanted to add that to the very rich conversation. And maybe if I take a moment just to answer the second one as well on the, how the operators can share costs. So it's about, you see the mobile payments. We have some statistics. Mobile money accounts for 33% of Safari comes total revenue in Kenya. So what happens is the moment the operator start putting the infrastructure, there is a cost. But in a very short time, you see high adoption of mobile money accounts. And that can help generate revenue for them. So that was the sharing that we saw in Uganda, Benin and Zambia. And in Bangladesh, we worked with something called Telekarta to get money to the SMEs as well. So again, getting everybody onto a digital payment system might help infrastructure costs. Thanks, David. Thanks, Mabato. Really important point. Thank you. Mabato, you got thoughts? Yes, thank you everyone for your responses. I think I've still lived with the question of how we engage in other supporting structures, particularly such as electrification. Electrification structures to ensure that connectivity is not only made available, but it can be enhanced through dedicated electricity access, but also data cost and data pricing and the global need for regulation. I mean, we have increased mobile penetration across the world. However, data cost is fairly high, particularly in global South countries. If we think of Africa, for example, we think comparatively with South Asia, South Asia and Western Asia, the difference in the data cost and pricing there, how do we ensure that the regulation goes wayward and the focus of investments to shift not only looking into monopolies and multilateral institutions, but engaging with SMMEs because that's exactly where you're going to find a higher penetration of young people and young social entrepreneurs, not only with the experience of having worked in multilateral and your large mobile operators, but trying to begin more decentralized operators, more decentralized mechanisms of communication themselves. I think we are all pivoting and looking inwards in terms of what we're doing institutionally, but through our work, we forget that there are social, economic and environmental determinants that have excluded varying groups, including that of young people and there is still a lot of opportunity to tap into the excluded groups, not only include them, but tap into these groups to ensure that our goals are met. Thank you. Thanks so much, Mavito. There's so many great points that we're hearing here and all the require further contemplation and follow-up and I hope that will continue. We're going to move on now. I want to get to the audience to hear what the audience thinks. We have a poll for the audience, so we can really learn a little bit about what this group thinks about these points. So let's get those questions up on the screen for the audience. The first one is, what are the most important connectivity funding needs? Infrastructure, skills, local content or policies and regulation? Second is, who should be the primary funder of connectivity in developing countries? Governments, donors, private sector. Of course, maybe the private sector is kind of what we were just talking about. The users maybe ultimately can help fund this indirectly or directly. And then finally, that's my thought, how can the private sector be incentivized to invest in connectivity? So take a minute or two to answer those questions, then we'll share the results. Shouldn't take too long. Everybody vote now. I guess I will wait for someone to decide we've gotten the answers and put the results on the screen. So thank you all. What a great discussion we're having. I'm just so impressed with the ITU for organizing it and bringing this great group together. This kind of discussion is urgent as I think all of our panelists would strongly agree. Can we see the results? Okay, let's, okay. Most important connectivity funding needs infrastructure in the opinion of this group, although sure we won't stint on the others too. Who should be the primary funder? Government is the plurality of this group. Private sector's got to be part of that too. And I guess you can scroll up and see the answer to the last question. How can the private sector be incentivized? All of the above raising awareness, risk mitigation and blended finance. Wow, that's how I would have answered that as well. Fantastic, Paul. Thank you all for participating. A lot of people answered those questions. I'll leave that up just a little longer. Another thing that really needs to be factored in is the devices that people have to use at the end points to get this all to work. If you don't have a device to connect to the internet, connectivity doesn't matter. And unfortunately, as highlighted in the ITU connectivity, Connecting Humanity Report, the Alliance for Affordable Internet estimates that 2.5 billion people in the world live in countries where the cost of smartphones is 25% or more of the average monthly income. In Africa, the cost of a smartphone is about on average 63% of monthly income. So devices are definitely another essential connectivity need. So, wow. So, Danala, could you come on now and let's see what some questions are that have come from your community and then we'll maybe get some questions from the audience as well. Thank you. Hi, Danala. Hello, David. I know that the chat has been really active in the Q&A box as well. So I'll just go through really quickly some of the things we've been getting on Twitter. So I'm gonna touch on first. We have tweets from Ali Al-Toblani. He is from our Generation Connect Arab States group and he just tweets that he's really excited to be in this Finance to Connect event and he's commending all the wonderful panelists. We also have tweets from ER underscore Stella 22 saying that they're excited as well. Then also saying, the discussion is really interesting but then there's a question, where can money be invested at a community level to have the most impact towards improving digital inclusion? So that's a question there. And then also I want to highlight Rita Eden. So she's from our Generation Connect Africa group and she's actually quoting Preeti Sinha saying leave no one behind in the digital era. And then also quoting one of the questions that Mubattu, who is of course from one of the young members of the Generation Connect Visionaries Board saying when she said, how can young people be seen as part of the supply chain or the core supply chain? So some really powerful questions there and of course highlighted some of the parts that really stood out to our community there. So hand over now to you, David to evaluate these questions but also some of the things coming up in the chat and the community. Don't hesitate to bring some more to the floor here but I think this question of how communities and also local governments can participate in this whole process is a key one. And I'd invite any of the panelists to take a stab at that. Preeti, you want to jump in on that? Local governments and connectivity. Yeah, I saw that. Local governments and local communities and particularly local governments. We haven't really talked much about governments per se so far. Yeah, so actually it ties in really well about with the two of the three pillars that we have in our organization. So the next one is called Local Development Finance. And really we work at the municipal subsorbering level to finance projects. And here I think the question was beautifully put I actually sent it to my colleagues about how we work with municipalities to increase digital connectivity at that level. So the scale is more doable in some ways and we work on projects like inclusive city where you provide safety for women in cities. So again, using the mobile and connectivity to make the municipal environment safer and several other aspects, including getting the infrastructure, the towers into particular municipalities and how that could be financed. So definitely I totally agree. I think both were very relevant for us. Anybody else want to jump in? Charlotte, did you want to add a comment? Yeah, maybe it's not necessary. Yes, please. When we went again, I'm sticking to the example. When we started to think about closing the gap for children and young people, we were obviously thinking the end game is a gadget and it's not necessarily the school if you want to reach out. But then again, you need to plan backwards. So how do we actually really reach people in a way that's doable? That's where we kind of said the school will not only be reaching the young, it will also be very natural for the local governments or for the community to build around. So when we start to break this investments down, we need to work with the national government and the decentralized says, how things are decentralized differs, but we really need to work outside in, bottom up to make that really happen. And again, that's why we see the school because we don't want to be up here. So it's a way to think about it and do it. And anybody else want to jump in or Denola, more comments? Okay, can I? Adelaide, please. Yeah, I'll talk about cities and give an example. We built five by more than 18 major cities of the continent with a population of over a million or two. One critical issue, even in sometimes in one country, you would find three, four cities, they've got different rules in giving you access to building fiber or what is called to servitudes or wayleaves, depending how they call it in those countries in any country rather. So the critical issue, I think either at ITU level or there's a need to standardize that city reticulation of optic fiber so that the processes of approval can be almost in a template format, rather than sometimes you take four months to get rights to build fiber or in other places you get maybe a month. So it's a very important issue from a connectivity and investment point of view, because an investor, if you have to spend six months negotiating with local government about approval processes for you to build fiber in the city to connect homes and businesses, it's a huge issue for us. So sometimes the bottlenecks of regulations are no more with the traditional telecom regulators, but with municipalities. So it's something that requires attention in our view. Thank you. Well, obviously if tax receipts go up in a local community, that gives them more money to invest back in infrastructure creation too, which is so great. Hiro, did you wanna chime in and Aya please? If you have anything to add, please feel free. Or we can go. I was going to add to what Andrea said that maybe when I said giving transparency, it's another way for local community members to participate. Like we, the Eastern Foundation supported the UNICEF crypto fund, which is like a first public sector's fund that actually makes all the funding transparent. Like you can see exactly how the money moves or how the talk in crypto moves. And then I, that let anyone, including providers, they, you know, like whether intentional or not intentional, there's no, that you can't exploit the system. If you don't provide internet, you don't get paid. That is like, I wish other also places like, like, you know, like any internet providers do that because it's, I often get spotty internet even in San Francisco or other parts of the world. And I think creating more accountability and make it more visible is very, very important for regular to actually see the reality and move, like actually take actions on it. I think a lot of people have a lot of questions about how distributed ledger technologies are going to play in here. It's a pretty new set of ideas. Like, Hiro, did you want to jump in? Yeah, well, well, several things. Like obviously like local governments, you know, how they are actively contribute to sort of like minimize the work of the other financier, the investor really determined the actual, the motivation for the investor to really take any product seriously. And I got many, many feedback from the investor who try to invest in an infrastructure including a digital one in developing countries. They just came back saying like, there are too much nuances and too much localized rules and they gave up. So I think that that's one thing, which you know, the other organization like UN or the some of the international multilateral organization can actually contribute to make it a bit more straightforward and less, you know, require less efforts for the investors. And then the other point I would like to make is like all these like a new technology crypto or a constellation, all those kind of new technologies should be taken, you know, taken look at by the investors. Because if you look at this, it's so difficult to motivate the investor to look at the local physical infrastructure project in a developing countries, but how much money they are willing to put into cryptocurrency and also the new internet technologies. So on one hand, we need to be much more innovative in the way we structure the finance but maybe we can actually work on what kind of infrastructure we are presenting to the investor. I mean, we can put the more innovation on that side as well. So innovation really makes us different on the both side of equation. That's one point I would like to make. Do you know anything else coming in in your community there that we want to make sure we catch before we move on? There was one more question quite philosophical about is infrastructure and connectivity is real as infrastructure and wealth but it's very similar to a question by someone in the Q and A function. I think they're called Clement Bond where they're saying as you know, infrastructures are not the end all and be all as private sector stakeholders also need finance to actually provide the service. So what available options are there to fund long-term services in connectivity? So that I think- For the individuals at the end users themselves, is that what that person is referring to you think? I think they're referring to funding that actually providing the services for people to then be connected. So basically funding all the way through not just the infrastructure itself but actually the service that leads to that infrastructure being provided. And that's very closely related to another one that has been coming in about innovative ways to finance the devices. I mean, in the end the users need help to not only understand but also pay for these services. So anybody who has comments on that, I think and then we can move to some closing thoughts what everybody's learned so far here. Can I maybe say- Please. David that one elephant in the room here is data itself. Yes. To monetize it. Monetization of data could probably lower that 420 plus billion that we need to 2030. These networks generate a lot of data and we can actually monetize that data on an anonymized basis. I think the open data project of the UN should probably think about how and maybe the ITU how to for instance, engage mobile network operators telcos on a monetization model of data itself. I mean, there are a lot of advertising companies who could pay for, I mean, the person Mabato was talking about where they cannot actually be able to pay for connectivity or internet connectivity by advertising is one of our approach to finance this. I can go in. All right. Yes, please. So just maybe on the services, I was trying to expand on that example I gave in Bangladesh, maybe it helps. So Talikata is a SME financing provider and how they provide that financing is by using the digital inventory data and the digital payment streams of the merchants that it serves. So using data, then it's able to do that credit scoring. So I think that kind of service is one of the key pillars going forward of course with data packages, et cetera. But that's one example I could think of and on terms of devices being cheaper, there's a great company I met him called Ion Sigma AION Sigma finish entrepreneur who is trying to get phones into Nigeria and again, micro credit to buy phones and the phones shut down if the person doesn't make the payment. So but making it cheaper and more affordable to buy phones. Thanks. And of course, let's not forget that the data is being monetized now by Facebook and Google in particular and even Facebook in particular has done a lot which is controversial to subsidize service in return in order if you pretty much rely on Facebook. So these are complicated questions that are gonna have to be wrestled with. Charlie, did you have a thought on that? Yeah, I just want to add to pretty because there are agencies out there that do guarantees instead of putting a hundred million into a grant which is one off they put into guarantees and they do guarantee the risk in micro finance systems like that. There are not many of them and it's out there. It's not even innovative but it's not necessarily used from a kind of local enough and I really think we need the movement hero to raise the awareness there because mitigating risk is part of this equation and there are tools. Okay, we're gonna move to a quick summary takeaways. I'd like each of you to in a very short couple of sentences tell us what you have most learned or are gonna take away from this hero. Let's start with you. You got on mute. There you go. Yes, I think the, I'm learning as well. Like there's a lot of the efforts being made and there are a lot of like a new idea being available and there are so many tools being developed but has never been well integrated and also that I just keep pushing like everybody seems to have to have a sense of universal ownership and we will prosper by making the system prosper. So we need to get out the other concept of we have to be competitive but we have to be competitive for our sustainability or each business, each country but at the same time we need to make sure the whole system is sustainable and thank you very much for challenges from a younger generation. Those kind of the push really keep me working on this agenda. Thank you. Thank you hero. I should have thanked Danola before she went off screen so thank you so much for her help in the last segment. Okay, Aya, your final thoughts. Yes, this was also a great learning for me to reading comments in the chat. I think it's very important to incorporate the challenges that local places or communities have and then put that into the system because that's possible. And I am excited about this web three technology to not to repeat the mistakes or the failures that the former web two version had and with that we really need to learn from the challenges everyone has. There's some good ideas of a student ledger as a way to solve some of those things. And Delay. Connectivity 2.0 is about open source, open source the entire network to tokenize the infrastructure, three open data and monetize that data to lower the price of connectivity. Thank you. Thank you and thanks for keeping that brief because we're running a little late pre-team. I would say innovative financing for reaching the last mile. Digital is one way you can overcome leapfrog stages of development. So very much supporting all the colleagues here including the Giga project on the education and using blockchain, but reaching the last mile. The women, the vulnerable, the marginalized and just to plug on the statistics, women are 23% less likely to access digital services. So let's do that. Thanks. Please, thank you for that reminder, Charlotte. You're muted, sorry. I want to echo hero. I have learned that this panel is a system if we want to see it like that and can actually do something around that. So, and it's been very clear. And also the system has some new components that I didn't hear two years ago. And that's super promising because I actually thought that we did only the talking for a while, but I'm very encouraged by this conversation. So thank you. Well, you know, your point about everybody here needs to keep working together is so pertinent to the WTTC. That's what it's for is to bring these discussions even more intense in person eventually. And we'll really all be continuing on this dialogue as we continue the road to Addis and in Addis. So we are now going to go to our word cloud exercise and ask each of you to give us the one word that summarizes what you would like to see coming out of WTTC. So let's get started with Doreen. Just each one of you to give us your one word, Doreen. Commitment. Hero. Connect it. And deal it. You did. No, no, no, no. Blend it. Blend it. Blend it. Blend it. Good word. Empower as a verb. Beautiful. For action. Prety. To access. Access. Charlotte. Outcomes. Good one. Mabato. Centralization. Tanola. Transformation. But before this meeting, we asked members of the CIS regional youth group what their one word is and the most popular word they said was innovation. Transformation and innovation. Wonderful. Okay. We're going to do some little backend work to put that word cloud together and I'll turn it over to Doreen for some closing thoughts. Thank you so much, David. I've been a little quiet. I've been trying to preserve my voice too many, too many Zoom sessions, but thank you so much, everyone. This has been an incredible conversation. I think David, we were hoping for some out of the box thinking and I think we succeeded in getting that. So we also got some great concrete examples of things that are happening in the field, which is terrific. I think we also saw David that the resources are there, but we need to find better ways to leverage them. We also heard that we need to universalize ownership and to create integrated platforms that aggregate demand, size matters, as we heard. And of course, Charlotte talked about that in the context of Giga, how we're trying to aggregate demands, also linked to the Giga bond. The open source network idea that Ndili put forward the need to tokenize, figure out how to tokenize infrastructure. Super interesting. How can we crowd source? Love that. The 428 billion. Of course, the importance of measurement impact measurement I think is also key. The role of technologies like blockchain and how they can help by enhancing accountability, transparency and trust. I think that's really critical. And of course, we heard from many that need for this mind shift change that connectivity needs to be understood, as Ndili said, as a marketplace that generates growth. Of course, the importance of local ownership that was stressed as well in the chat and the engagement with local communities. I didn't mention it, but we have quite a lot that we're doing the ITU in that space with our smart village work. I think moving forward, we need to work intergenerationally, I would say, certainly working more closely with young people, as well as working with the informal sector. I think that's really important. And of course, we've heard about the role of blended finance, the need for public-private partnerships, and of course, expanding the stakeholder base, the need to make the whole system sustainable. We heard that. And of course, the importance of collaboration and cooperation never being so important. Lastly, Hiro mentioned this need for a global movement. And Charlotte, you also echoed that. As the president of the general assembly mentioned in the beginning, we have this partner to connect segment as part of the WTDC and link to that. We're building this coalition, a multi-stakeholder platform as part of our WTDC preparations with a focus on LDCs, SIDS, LLDC, so Preeti will be reaching out to you. And I certainly would invite you all to join us in that movement. And with that, David, I just want to thank everyone again. It's really been a terrific conversation. And I think now it's time to move into action. Back over to you, David. Thank you. Thank you, Doreen. And congrats to you and your team for putting this all together. I've learned a lot myself. And OK, brace yourself. You're going to see something great. Let's get Jim Rogers' illustration up on the screen that he has been producing throughout this session to give us a visual reminder of what's happened today. And this will be available after the fact also. Jim, can you come on and show us what you've done? Oh, I appear to be signed out. I'm sure you will. We don't see your image. Yes, I appear to be signed out. It's signed me out, unfortunately. Let me see what I can do to get the image up. You want to work on that? Are you ready? We could show the word cloud first. Anna, I'm going to ambush you. There we go. OK, we're going to see. There's the word cloud. OK. And that will contribute to the aggregate word cloud that we're going to be producing as we go forward to WTDC. That's a really good group of words. But I bet we see Jim's illustration, which I hope we're going to be able to do. And I'm hoping that Santa Nella is working with Jim to get that up. We'll see another incredible record of what we've been doing here. Yes, just coming up now. Great. Two seconds. Here we go. Oh, there we go. OK. A lot of ideas and I'm still recording a few things. But yes, really interesting. Everybody try to drink that in that's a lot. That was a lot to take in, but hopefully COVID is as much as possible. I like that open source is key with the arrow pointing up right next to Andy Lee. That's a really key point. I was so glad he said that. And you did some nice images of people. Boy, that really looks like Doreen down there too. Okay. Well, thank you. And thank you, everyone, for your participation. Thanks to all the speakers for this great discussion. And we hope to see you at our next stop on June 22nd, when the Road to Addis will focus in on the topic of leadership. Okay, there we have the Road to Addis Road leadership. Then in July, we'll look at innovation in August youth. And in September, we'll have a big picture wrap up. So see you all at all those events. And if you have four minutes, we'd also appreciate it if you would complete our survey on this session so we can further improve the quality of the series. Thank you all so much. See you soon. And let's just all think about the wonderful things we've learned today. Thank you, David. Thank you, everyone. David. Thanks, Doreen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Doreen. Thank you, panelists. Thank you, David. Great job. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.